Business process management (BPM) is a field in operations management that focuses on improving corporate performance by managing and optimizing a company's business processes. It can therefore be described as a “process optimization process.” It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach. These processes can impact the cost and revenue generation of an organization.
As a policy-making approach, BPM sees processes as important assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and developed to announce value-added products and services to clients or customers. This approach closely resembles other total quality management or continual improvement process methodologies and BPM proponents also claim that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology. As such, many BPM articles and scholars frequently discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology.
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standard for business process modeling that provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD), based on a flowcharting technique very similar to activity diagrams from Unified Modeling Language (UML). The objective of BPMN is to support business process management, for both technical users and business users, by providing a notation that is intuitive to business users, yet able to represent complex process semantics. The BPMN specification also provides a mapping between the graphics of the notation and the underlying constructs of execution languages, particularly Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).
The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a standard notation readily understandable by all business stakeholders. These include the business analysts who create and refine the processes, the technical developers responsible for implementing them, and the business managers who monitor and manage them. Consequently, BPMN serves as a common language, bridging the communication gap that frequently occurs between business process design and implementation.
Computers with sets of instructions may often be employed in BPMN to help to monitor and optimize business processes. A set of instructions (software) may often be custom created for a particular business process. Whenever the business process changes (e.g., an old machine being disposed of, a new machine added, a new worker hired, an existing worker retired, etc.), the custom software may become outdated and may need to be re-written. Such software modification may be expensive and may take significant time. An out-date software may not be optimized and the less than optimized business processes may lead to lower resource utilization, lower production and logistical efficiency, higher worker fatigue, higher wastage, and ultimately lower profit margin.